On July 26, the U.S. Air National Guard will get the green light to begin firing lasers from unmanned attack drones in a vast swath of skies over North Dakota, despite the concerns of local commercial pilots. At the Devils Lake home of the North Dakota Army National Guard, pilots train on MQ-1 Predator drones -- the most prevalent unmanned attack

Im going to go hard left on you here, Im going ACLU. I dont want regulations, I dont want restrictions, I want a ban on this. Drones are instruments of war. The Founders had a great aversion to any instruments of war, the use of the military inside even the United States. It didnt like standing armies, it has all kinds of statutes of using the army in the country.

A drone is a high-tech version of an old army and a musket. It ought to be used in Somalia to hunt bad guys but not in America. I dont want to see it hovering over anybodys home. Yes, you can say we have satellites, weve got Google Street View and London has a camera on every street corner but thats not an excuse to cave in on everything else and accept a society where youre always under  being watched by the government. This is not what we want.

I would say that you ban it under all circumstances and I would predict, Im not encouraging, but I an predicting that the first guy who uses a Second Amendment weapon to bring a drone down thats been hovering over his house is going to be a folk hero in this country.

"They" could just as easily use F-16s on us. What's magically different about "Drones? When M1s are doing live fire exercises at Ft. Knox, are they training to shoot at us? (As a helpful tip, I'd pretty much ignore every article that describes UAVs/UAS as "drones" - the military and industry doesn't use the term at all, and it's a tipoff it's a scare article written by a clueless journalist.

Secretary of Defense Gates said that "I don't know anybody at the Department of Defense, Mr. Tiahrt, who thinks that this program should, or would, ever be operationally deployed. The reality is that you would need a laser something like 20 to 30 times more powerful than the chemical laser in the plane right now to be able to get any distance from the launch site to fire."

"So, right now the ABL would have to orbit inside the borders of Iran in order to be able to try and use its laser to shoot down that missile in the boost phase. And if you were to operationalize this you would be looking at 10 to 20 747s, at a billion and a half dollars apiece, and $100 million a year to operate. And there's nobody in uniform that I know who believes that this is a workable concept."

The Air Force did not request further funds for the Airborne Laser for 2010; Air Force Chief Schwartz has said that the system "does not reflect something that is operationally viable." In December 2011, it was reported that the project was to be ended after 16 years of development and a cost of over $5 billion.

Good thing the Navy is getting good at shooting down missiles the old fashioned way.

28
posted on 07/21/2012 4:18:15 PM PDT
by Moonman62
(The US has become a government with a country, rather than a country with a government.)

Not a big thing. Why? Think about it. Whether its the military, home land security, the fbi, your local sheriffs office, all of these people have family. You can easily find out who, and where they are located. For example, if my neighbor has a son in the military, or the fbi, I can find that out.

If for example, someone comes to my door, and wants to collect the penalty/tax for 0bamacare, then I invite them in. Same with the secret service or fbi.

Then I learn who sent them and their location. Sure, it will get messy, but then I go up their chain of command. Eventually, they all come over to our side or die...or I do.

“...you would need a laser something like 20 to 30 times more powerful than the chemical laser in the plane right now...”

Incorrect. While true we were able to get only about half the design power out of the test vehicle's COIL in ABL, we could easily (with a straightforward redesign and the knowledge we have now) get that power up 2 to 3 times it's current levels. That would be MORE than enough to suppress all ballistic missile activity in a theater the size of Iran 24 hours a day with a fleet of 7-10 ABLs (depending on the assumptions you make regarding reliability, on station availability, etc).

ABL’s range is only weakly tied to laser power. It's range is a much stronger function of the adaptive optics system which could be enhanced to significantly increase lethal range from the current test bird. If that quote from Gates is accurate, he doesn't have a clue what he's talking about.

On the other hand, I also am a skeptic about the operational viability of ABL, but for a host of logistics and maintenance reasons unrelated to the performance of the laser weapon itself. Oh, and there were many of us in uniform far more informed than him that felt the system could be developed into a viable operational platform. Give us one year's overrun in the F-22 program, and we could have cleared the skies. It's all a matter of priorities.

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